DENVER - Colorado is one of 10 states that won waivers from the controversial "No Child Left Behind" law.
The law set standards that educators call unrealistic and has long been criticized for raising the profile of standardized test scores.
The waiver does not mean an end to standardized testing, but it does mean the state can stop using dueling sets of measurements for school performance.
"What we got out of was two conflicting systems of accountability," Colorado Department of Education official Keith Owen said.
Those two systems are NCLB's standard, known as AYP, or adequate yearly progress, and the state's standard.
As of next school year, the NCLB standard will be dropped in Colorado in favor of the state's own system.
One criticism of the NCLB standard is that it sets up a pass/fail system in which schools either meet AYP or they fail to meet it.
That meant a school could make vast improvements in a variety of areas, but fail because it missed one part of the standard.
Colorado adopted its own state-level standards with four levels of performance to give credit to schools that make progress, but don't meet the federal AYP standard.
The state standard also helps zero in on the schools that need the most work to improve.
Seventy five percent of Colorado school districts are failing to meet AYP, but just 15 percent are in the bottom two categories under the state system.
Colorado also adopted an online system to report the results, which the Obama administration pointed to as an example of transparency.
(KUSA-TV © 2012 Multimedia Holdings Corporation)